In this issue, sys admin columnist and tool veterinarian Charly Kühnast invites Sysdig, the jack-of-all-trades among system diagnostic tools, into his surgery for a quick checkup. The project promises to unite the functionality of lsof, iftop, netstat, tcpdump, and others.

Security vulnerabilities in the kernel often remain undetected. The kernel hacker initiative, Kernel Self-Protection, promotes safe programming techniques to keep attackers off the network, and, if they do slip through the net, mitigate the consequences.